Get her a photomosaic. :-)
Go here:
http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/
And then take a bunch of your digital photos and find one with a large subject in an interesting pose. Then set the tiles across to between 60 and 90, and the tile width to 25 to test and then 100 for final, and set the amount to let it modify the images to 25%. Then let it do it's thing for about 2 minutes for the preview and 20 for the full res one. You could get away with 50 maybe for the full res.
Then print it. I went to Kinko's. Turns out the large format sign printer there sucks, and that was the $35 one. So I went for the laser instead, and that came out much sharper, and I was able to print it at 11x14, which was a pretty good size still.
Then get a nice frame for it. Try a crafts shop. Frames are cheap there. You have to have a frame cause it makes it 10x better. Get a frame with a matte around the border, so the frame itself is like 16x20. A black wood frame with white matte looks nice.
Total cost: $15, and it's much cooler and more personal than a DVD.
You may have to print the image two or three times to get it right though. If your monitor is calibrated right, then the image on the printer will be more red, so you will need to adjust the image to be more green and blue. Also, darks will be much darker, so you will need to push the brightness up by about 25 percent using the middle slider in the levels. This should make an image which looks crappy and too bright on your monitor but prints nice.
Lucky for me when I went to Kinko's there was a nice young girl there who let me go behind the counter and work in photoshop to fix the image up. I ended up adjusting the image in photoshop with a few layers to look like the crappy printout, and then I adjusted THAT to get it to look nice again with more layers, and then removed the printer layers to end up with the image I sent to the printer. Amazingly, it worked perfect on the first try even though their monitor was so bright I could hardly tell if I was even matching the printer colors well.
Go here:
http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/
And then take a bunch of your digital photos and find one with a large subject in an interesting pose. Then set the tiles across to between 60 and 90, and the tile width to 25 to test and then 100 for final, and set the amount to let it modify the images to 25%. Then let it do it's thing for about 2 minutes for the preview and 20 for the full res one. You could get away with 50 maybe for the full res.
Then print it. I went to Kinko's. Turns out the large format sign printer there sucks, and that was the $35 one. So I went for the laser instead, and that came out much sharper, and I was able to print it at 11x14, which was a pretty good size still.
Then get a nice frame for it. Try a crafts shop. Frames are cheap there. You have to have a frame cause it makes it 10x better. Get a frame with a matte around the border, so the frame itself is like 16x20. A black wood frame with white matte looks nice.
Total cost: $15, and it's much cooler and more personal than a DVD.
You may have to print the image two or three times to get it right though. If your monitor is calibrated right, then the image on the printer will be more red, so you will need to adjust the image to be more green and blue. Also, darks will be much darker, so you will need to push the brightness up by about 25 percent using the middle slider in the levels. This should make an image which looks crappy and too bright on your monitor but prints nice.
Lucky for me when I went to Kinko's there was a nice young girl there who let me go behind the counter and work in photoshop to fix the image up. I ended up adjusting the image in photoshop with a few layers to look like the crappy printout, and then I adjusted THAT to get it to look nice again with more layers, and then removed the printer layers to end up with the image I sent to the printer. Amazingly, it worked perfect on the first try even though their monitor was so bright I could hardly tell if I was even matching the printer colors well.